Encore! Encore!: Prof. Kelley's Latest

At Harvard, we are supposed to get a liberal education. For most of us, this means learning about the occasional Samurai, Bonobo or Greek Hero. But for many, this also means learning about the premiere performances of five of the world's greatest pieces of classical music.

For years, Harvard University Professor of Music Thomas Forrest Kelly has guided undergraduates through the debut performances of Monteverdi's Orfeo, Handel's Messiah, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in his popular core course, First Nights: Five Premiere Performances. This fall, Kelley made a debut of his own when his book, First Nights: Five Premiere Performances, was published by Yale University Press. Prof. Kelley recently sat down with The Crimson to discuss books, music and cybersex.

The Harvard Crimson: Did the idea for First Nights originate at Harvard?

Tom Kelly: No, actually it originated at the Oberlin Conservatory. I was teaching a class called First Nights about these same five pieces, but it was designed for pre-professional conservatory musicians. When I came here, it seemed that a similar course might be a good way to introduce people more generally to classical music and performance. The course and the book are both about what it was like to be present when each of these pieces was on the cutting edge of contemporary music.

THC: How did you become interested in premiere performances, as opposed to the pieces in general?

TK: Part of this comes from my interest in early music, finding out how music sounded when it was new. It's not because you're trying to tell everyone that they must play the piece as it was played at its premiere, but I think that music is most interesting when it's in its originally intended context. Beethoven didn't write his symphonies for musicologists and critics; he wrote it for prospective ticket purchasers. Those were his people. The other aspect is the reinforcement of how exciting performance is. We have CDs, and this is great. We can listen to whatever we want whenever we want. Before 1920 or so, if you wanted to hear music, you had to make it yourself or go to where someone was making music. Music existed only when someone was performing. If a CD performance wasn't good, the CD wouldn't have been issued. But when an orchestra is on stage sweating bullets and no one knows how the music will turn out, there's some excitement.

THC: Many pieces of music have a premiere, their "first night." But pieces by Shostakovich or Tchaikowsky, for example, don't appear in either your course or your book. How did you decide upon these five pieces?

TK: One reason is that they're great pieces. But you're right to think that other pieces could fit. There's no Mozart or Bach here. First, you have to pick a piece that you know enough about to make a plausible reconstruction of the first performance. For a Bach cantata, you may not know enough about how it worked or when it first was performed. These five pieces also span a broad history of music. We go from the very late Renaissance to 20th-century music. For a person who only studies music in a limited manner, this book may provide guideposts. Furthermore, these are all large-scale pieces. A whole society has to get involved in these performances. People have to copy parts, sweep orange peels, sell tickets, play in the orchestra, etc. Lastly, these pieces all tell a story, they're all narratives of some sort; they're more than just notes. I can't say that any one of these reasons predominates.

THC: The challenge when working with well-known music is to write something original. How does First Nights address these works of music in unique ways?

TK: These pieces are icons, they're placed on a pedestal and worshiped like gods in most books. In this book, we stop studying once the first performance is over. There's a whole lot of scholarship on the later influence of these pieces, but all of those things are built up after the piece. I'm interested in what these pieces were like when they had no history at all, when they played the first note and you didn't know what the second note sounded like.

THC: Is this book intended primarily for the audience of your course?

TK: No. The book is not intended to be a textbook. It's intended to be for people who are interested in music. The pieces are pieces that people interested in classical music probably know something about. We are using it as a textbook, but it's not written to be a textbook, and I hope it doesn't look and feel like a textbook.

THC: Were these pieces recognized as masterpieces at their premieres?

TK: I don't think that any of these pieces got their best performance at their premiere. And they've now been performed in many different ways. There are jazz versions of Handel's Messiah, there are Christian Rock versions also. Things become a masterpiece by subsequent people acknowledging them as such. Other things are masterpieces because you can just look or listen and say, "This is a masterpiece." The Rite of Spring was hated at its premiere. But it was still a masterpiece then, in absolute terms.

THC: In your opinion, how does music influence other realms of life?

TK: I study classical music because I love it, but we all know that it occupies an increasingly smaller part of the everyday attention span. I hope that's a temporary thing. I hope it comes back, like natural fibers and vegetarian diets. I'm going to wait it out. I am interested in making people involved in actively engaging music, supporting the presence of music and musicians in their world. Ultimately, I want people to realize how lucky they are to be alive on a planet that has such wonderful music past, present and future.

THC: It seems that a key concept of First Nights is "creation in performance." Can you explain that idea?

TK: We can look in a piano bench and pull out a bunch of pieces of paper that we call music, sheet music. But it's not music. It's a representation. To me, music happens when sound is heard by people for pleasure. Music happens in time, not on paper. Someone has to be creating, and someone has to be listening.

THC: The saxophonist Sonny Rollins said that performing in concert is like making love to an audience, while recording a CD is like cybersex. Do you agree?

TK: Nobody's reacting [with a CD]. You don't know how you're doing. I know just what he means.

THC: This seems to be a common problem. What do you think the nature of the gap between performance and representation?

TK: CDs are people making music, but they're not making it now. We forget that symphony orchestras can't be put in jewel cases. When you perform for people, you can get a sense of how you're doing. If you're doing we'll and people are enjoying it, you do better. You rise to the occasion and things come out that you didn't know you had in you. Other days, nothing goes right and you go through the motions. Music is not just what I do; it's an interaction among people.

THC: So that's music at it's essence?

TK: I think so.